It’s the sixth year of Barack Obama’s presidency, the job market is still sluggish, most Americans say they’re unhappy with the economy, and Obama’s approval ratings are down.

So what’s the Republican plan to turn it around?

The answer is, they don’t all think they need one and those who do can’t agree on a unified view. But some prominent Republicans are warning their compatriots that they need to get their act together — because just running against the Obama record isn’t going to be enough.

Especially if they want to be ready for 2016 … as in, see Romney, Mitt.

From all the outward signs, Republicans could do just fine in the midterms. GOP strategists say voters are so frustrated with the economy that they’re ready to give Republicans a chance, and could hand them the keys to the Senate as well as the House. The problems with the Obamacare rollout haven’t exactly helped Democrats, either.

But it’s one thing to run against the “Obama/Mark Pryor economy” — or the Obama/any-red-state-Democrat economy — and another to lay out the positive alternatives. Some Republicans and influential conservatives are warning the party that if they don’t lay out alternatives, they’ll miss a big opportunity.

Their argument: Voters are ready to listen to Republicans, but they’d better have something to say. Fighting Obamacare can be part of the conversation, they say, because Republicans can make the case that it has economic impact — but the conversation can’t end there.

And if all they do is run against the Obama record and hope that’s enough, these Republicans and conservative thinkers say, that’s what Romney did in 2012 — and it didn’t work.

“This is a time when the party out of power should have these kinds of discussions,” said Pete Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center and a former adviser to President George W. Bush.

Even if the Republicans could do well in the midterms just running against the problems with Obama’s record — as they did in the 2010 midterm elections — they won’t be laying the groundwork for 2016, when the party will need to be ready with economic plans, he said.

“My concern is that [Obama’s record] creates a false dawn, just like 2010 did, and it reinforces the view of people who don’t want to put forward a positive vision,” Wehner said. “It might not hurt them in 2014, but it could hurt them in 2016.”

David Winston, House Speaker John Boehner’s pollster, says the party needs to have a clear focus leading up to the midterms: “As a political party, you need to be addressing the No. 1 issue concern as identified by the electorate. In this case, there’s no question it’s jobs and the economy.”

Some prominent Republicans already are on board. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has framed the GOP legislative agenda for this year around the theme of “An America That Works,” outlining plans in National Review — and in a memo to House Republicans — that put the spotlight on economic themes, such as regulatory relief and skills training to help create jobs. That’s based on the speech Cantor gave to House Republicans at their retreat in Cambridge, Md., in January, when he told rank-and-file members that the party needs to present its own ideas to the public, not just criticize Obama’s record, according to aides.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp is framing his tax reform plan as an economic agenda, too. He says it would create 1.8 million new jobs, and pitched it as a way to “start offering concrete solutions and debating real policies that strengthen the economy and help hardworking taxpayers.”

There’s more on the way. Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio is preparing to put out his own seven-point jobs plan that he says will include “pro-growth tax reform,” regulatory relief, expanded exports and opening up public lands for more energy exploration.

And Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman and former vice presidential candidate, is preparing another balanced-budget plan this year that will give House Republicans a platform to talk about their economic policies. “We’ve got to show that we are capable of governing and of leading this country. And we have to offer better ideas,” Ryan told an audience at a Cantor campaign breakfast in Richmond last week, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

The problem is, individual legislative efforts don’t always get much national attention — especially when they’re freelance efforts like Portman’s — and the ones cobbled together by the party leadership don’t always have a lot of meat on the bones. (Did you know there was a House Republican Plan for Economic Growth and Jobs? It’s light reading — each issue gets a sentence.)

That doesn’t necessarily mean they need to nationalize the election with one agenda, like House Republicans’ “Contract With America” in 1994 or their “Pledge to America” in 2010. But Republican candidates should at least have their own economic alternatives, said GOP pollster Whit Ayres: “What would you do differently? What’s your plan?”

And there’s so much dissatisfaction with the economy that “the environment is probably closer to a national election” than most midterms, said Republican pollster Ed Goeas, noting that 77 percent of voters in the January George Washington University Battleground Poll said their personal economic situation has either stayed the same or gotten worse over the past four years.

To many Republicans, though, the easiest way to say they’ve talked about the economy is to bash Obamacare.

In their view, fighting Obamacare is so central to their economic message that they’re content to keep the focus there. When Rep. Tom Cotton, the Arkansas Republican who’s running a strong race to unseat Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor, delivered the national GOP weekly address on Feb. 22, it was about Obamacare — with just a quick nod to the lagging economic recovery.

And Cotton is hardly an outlier. Of the 21 weekly Republican addresses since October — when the disastrous health care rollout began — 12 have been about Obamacare. Just three, in late January and early February, have had a clear focus on the economy and jobs.

That’s pretty far out of balance with what voters are calling the top priorities in this election. In February, unemployment ranked as the most important problem facing the country in a Gallup poll, with 23 percent of Americans putting jobs and unemployment at the top of the list. Health care ranked fourth, behind jobs, the economy in general and dissatisfaction with government.

“You can’t get around the fact that the voters would want the candidates to be talking about the economy and jobs,” as well as government’s ability to function in general, said Frank Newport, Gallup’s editor in chief. “Clearly, health care is near the top of the list, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Obamacare, good or bad. It just means health care is on their minds.”

In an interview, Cotton acknowledged that Arkansas voters are asking him plenty of questions about the economy, but he insists the two are tied so closely that they should be part of the same discussion.

“I hear as much from voters about the economy as I do about Obamacare, but they see them as really tightly linked,” Cotton said. “If your premiums are doubling or tripling, that reduces your take-home pay. If your employer is reducing your hours … that reduces your take-home pay.”

It’s not that other Republicans worry that Obamacare is off-topic in an election about the economy. They say the Congressional Budget Office gave them a clear economic tie-in with its report that found the law creates incentives to reduce work hours. Cantor says the House will take up a bill this month to rewrite the law’s employer health coverage mandate to define full-time work as 40 hours or more, rather than 30 hours, so businesses don’t cut back on people’s work hours.

And Republicans jumped on a report from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services that said 65 percent of small businesses will see their premiums go up under the health care law, while just 35 percent will have their rates go down. Boehner called the small-business premiums report “another sucker punch to our economy.”

But other Republicans and conservative analysts say fighting Obamacare shouldn’t be the beginning and end of the discussion about fixing the economy.

“I think the Republicans are right to make it a central focus, and Democrats are right to be nervous about it,” Wehner said. “But that just is not enough, and I hope Republicans don’t think it’s enough.”

It’s not an easy call for everyone in the GOP. Some Republicans aren’t convinced that it makes sense for candidates to put out more than general principles on the economy — because the more specific their plans get, the easier it is for their opponents to pick them apart.

If a Senate Republican candidate has a 10-point lead, “providing more grist is not going to be something you want to do,” said one GOP consultant who is working on Senate races. “I don’t think that gets you anywhere.”

But to Republicans and conservatives who say the party can’t just run against the Obama record, one point comes up over and over in the conversations: Look at what happened to Romney.

In their view, the Romney campaign thought he could just run against Obama, slam his economic record, and play it safe on the policies — and voters would pick Romney because they were so dissatisfied with Obama. Even Ryan, his running mate, was restrained in spelling out policy details.

It’s true that Obama was vulnerable on the economy. In the exit polls that year, 77 percent of voters said the national economic condition was “not so good” or “poor.”

And yet, somehow, there is no President Romney.

“I think that was implicitly the thinking of the Romney campaign,” said Yuval Levin, editor of the conservative policy journal National Affairs. “They didn’t want to get in their own way … I think that was a mistake.”

Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute, who has written a “Jobs Agenda for the Right,” says Republicans could probably “get away with” just playing to the base and running against Obama’s record. But “a better strategy that looks beyond 2014, and looks ahead to 2016, 2018 and 2020, is not just to be negative, but to say, ‘Here are our ideas. And here’s what we think government should be doing, not just what it shouldn’t be doing.’”

In Strain’s view, what government should do on jobs is to spend money differently to help the long-term unemployed — by offering relocation subsidies to help them move to where the jobs are, and by letting employers pay them less and offering wage subsidies to make up the difference.

And Wehner has written that “conservatives should offer a menu of structural reforms that do not simply attack government but transform it on conservative terms” — including the usual suspects like entitlement programs but also education, the Tax Code, infrastructure repairs and immigration.

Cantor’s packaging of the legislative agenda doesn’t go quite that far — you won’t find hot-button issues like entitlement reform or immigration on the list. Instead, he says the House will focus on measures to cut back on regulations, including one that would make agencies consider how their regulations would affect jobs in wages in specific industries.

House Republicans also will keep the pressure on the Senate to take up the “SKILLS Act” it passed last year, an easy way to keep job training in the conversation. The bill would wipe out a series of programs the GOP considers ineffective and make it easier for community colleges to participate in job training. (Democrats say it would hurt disadvantaged people and “eliminates programs for the sake of eliminating programs,” which means a Senate vote probably isn’t likely anytime soon.)

And Cantor says the House will vote on an alternative to Obamacare, though it’s not clear yet exactly what that will be. Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-N.C.) said at a POLITICO health care breakfast briefing Wednesday that getting Republicans to agree on one plan has been like “herding cats,” and the House could end up voting on “multiple bills” rather than one alternative.

Not all Republicans think it’s a good idea to be pushing economic alternatives that become political targets on their own. Camp, in particular, has gotten pushback against his tax reform proposals from Republicans who don’t think it’s a good idea to spell out who’s going to lose what loophole — and who’s going to have to pay higher rates — when the plan has no chance of becoming law this year. (Boehner offered only that it’s “the beginning of the conversation.”)

And even some conservatives who say the GOP should develop its own ideas don’t think it’s necessarily a priority for 2014.

“I think that’s ’16. I don’t think that’s ’14,” because no one expects Republicans to be able to pass an economic plan without the White House, said Douglas Holtz-Eakin of the American Action Forum. For now, the GOP should just make the case that whenever Obama and the Democrats are faced with a choice between economic growth and a social objective — like Obamacare — they “always pick against growth,” Holtz-Eakin said.

But other influential conservatives argue that Republicans will never gain a mandate for their economic ideas if they don’t start building it now.

“I’m not moved by the argument that by creating a target, you’re undermining your chances,” Levin said. “You have to gain some kind of mandate, and you can only do that by spelling out what you’re for.”